reak your heart to think of it! Watch by Him to-night, my friend, my
brother, and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim His own!'

Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beautiful; never
surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more penetrating gentleness.
After the storm of those opening words the change was magical. The tears
stood in Elsmere's eyes. But his quick insight, in spite of himself,
divined the subtle natural facts behind the outburst, the strained
physical state, the irritable brain--all the consequences of a long
defiance of physical and mental law. The priest repelled him, the man
drew him like a magnet.

'What can I say to you, Newcome?' he cried despairingly. 'Let me say
nothing, dear old friend! I am tired out; so, I expect, are you. I know
what this week has been to you. Walk with me a little. Leave these great
things alone. We cannot agree. Be content--God knows! Tell me about the
old place and the people. I long for news of them.'

A sort of shudder passed through his companion. Newcome stood wrestling
with himself. It was like the slow departure of a possessing force. Then
he sombrely assented, and they turned towards the City. But his answers,
as Robert questioned him, were sharp and mechanical, and presently it
became evident that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere
rigorously held him were more than he could bear.

As they reached St. Paul's, towering into the watery moonlight of the
clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night.

'You came to me in the spirit of war,' said Robert, with some emotion,
as he held his hand; 'give me instead the grasp of peace!'

The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A melancholy
quivering smile dawned on the priest's delicate lip.

'God bless you--God restore you!' he said sadly, and was gone.

CHAPTER XLI

A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his
story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or
forty members of the North R---- Club that he would give them a course
of lectures on the New Testament. One of them was the gasfitter Charles
Richards; another was the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally
challenged Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old
Scotchman of sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of
Hume and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest
of cracked voices, the Club had wri